The First Strike

By Richard Lacayo

The 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was Sept. 11 in slow motion. Over 15 endless months, 52 American hostages were imprisoned, interrogated and humiliated by the radical Islamic students who seized the embassy compound. Back home, night after night, a lugubrious Walter Cronkite played the role of national town crier, counting off the days of captivity. Is it any surprise that all these years later the hostage taking is an episode that refuses to subside into mere history? The mullahs who exploited it to consolidate their power still rule. The hatreds it set loose still poison relations between the U.S. and Iran. Some events won't lie down and play dead.

So when Mark Bowden calls the embassy drama "the first battle in America's war against militant Islam," that sounds about right. Guests of the Ayatollah (Atlantic Monthly Press; 680 pages) is his detailed and bleakly compelling account of what the hostages endured during the siege and of the anguish it produced in the U.S. The author of Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 U.S. military mission in Mogadishu that went lethally wrong, Bowden knows something about American misadventures in the wider world. He may not be a policy analyst, but he writes about events in a way that gives a clear picture of both high-level decision making and the price paid by people on the ground. Maybe that's something more policy analysts should try.

The embassy takeover was not just a symbolic blow against the U.S. but also a power play in the struggle between radical Islamists and more moderate elements within the Iranian revolution, who were already reaching out to the U.S. To the Islamic students, any rapprochement with Washington was supping with the devil. What the embassy takeover promised them was a chance to rekindle the revolution, goad the Great Satan into waving his pitchfork at Iran and force the moderates to renounce the U.S. and all its wicked devices.

The original plan had been to seize the embassy for just a few days and use it as a platform to broadcast Iranian grievances against the U.S. Those mostly stemmed from Washington's longtime support of the Shah, who had been placed on the Peacock Throne in 1953, after a CIA-instigated coup deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil industry. As Bowden points out, by the time of the Iranian revolution, most Americans had forgotten all about the coup. Most Iranians had not. When the White House allowed the exiled Shah to enter the U.S. to seek treatment for liver cancer, the stage was set for a new outbreak of fury that the religious radicals could manage to their advantage.

Bowden tells us that before deciding to admit the Shah, Jimmy Carter polled his top advisers. Most recommended that he do it. But when he also asked what they would do if the Iranians seized the embassy in retaliation, none answered. And when the thing actually happened, no one on any side was sure of exactly what to do. The triumphant but clueless students would hang on to the 52 frightened, angry Americans for 444 days, all the while making hapless attempts to prove that the embassy had been a cockpit of intrigue and espionage. Although for the most part the hostages were not subjected to torture, their detention and humiliation were in themselves an outrage and came complete with occasional beatings and sham executions. Spectacularly uncooperative types like Michael Metrinko, a political officer who could insult his guards (and their mothers) in fluent Farsi, were routinely roughed up and thrown into solitary. That may have been preferable to being subjected to political harangues by true believers like Massoumeh (Screaming Mary) Ebtekar, then a volcano of fundamentalist cant, later the first female Vice President of Iran.

Despite the students' conspiracy theories, Bowden says, the embassy actually housed just a few CIA officers, most of them new to the country and struggling to contact Iranians who could help them comprehend the shape-shifting revolution. Since none of them spoke Farsi, the American spies couldn't even read the Tehran newspapers.

As the siege wore on, a desperate Carter reached for an improbable armed mission. The plan called for slipping members of the U.S.'s still untested new Delta Force, an elite Army rescue unit, through Iranian airspace to a makeshift desert landing strip in Iran. Then they would be trucked into Tehran, where they would somehow fight their way into the embassy compound and out of it again with the hostages in tow. Instead, a Delta Force chopper collided on the runway with a C-130 transport plane that had 44 Delta troops inside, and eight soldiers died in the fireball. When word of the failed mission reached the White House, notes Bowden, Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, "ducked into the president's bathroom and vomited."

It would take nine more long months and Carter's loss of the White House to Ronald Reagan before the no less exhausted Iranians would conclude the negotiations that sent the hostages home. And 26 years after that, the passions of the moment still reverberate. In Bowden's book, you can feel them on every page.